Niklas Luhmann Quotes

Germany, Sociologist
December 8, 1927 – November, 6, 1998.

Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.

Also known as Philosopher

Only communication can communicate.

Niklas Luhmann
- Communication
- Communicate
But within the framework of an ideology such pluralism cannot be so enlarged as to incorporate into the political system and submit to political arbitration radical structural conflicts between family life and economic development, religión and culture, personality and the need for governmental administration, or between the expected motives of agents and the methods of recruiting. In such States, political pluralism remains on a technical and instrumental level; the problem-solving capacity of the political system is built on the premise that, in the last analysis, all critical problems can be reduced to economic problems. For this reason (and because of the political ideologization of all publíc life) limits are set to the level of complexity such a society can reach.

Niklas Luhmann
Does knowledge rest on construction in the sense that it only functions because the knowing system is operatively closed, therefore: because it can maintain no operative contact with the outside world; and because it therefore remains dependent, for everything that it constructs, on its own distinction between self-reference and allo-reference?

Niklas Luhmann
- Knowledge
- System
- Contact
In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique.

Niklas Luhmann
- Art
- Difference
- Function
Communication is improbable.

Niklas Luhmann
- Communication
- Improbable
Ideology claims to be binding for the whole society. This development leads to typical problems. As the complexity of society increases, so do the demands upon ideology as a schema for solving problems; in particular, there occurs an unsurveyable increase in the interdependencies among the individual components of an ideology, whose consistency must continue to be maintained. Changes, accommodations, and renovations in an ideology become markedly dífficult, because every small step can have unforeseeable repercussions upon the premises appealed to. The burdens upon the reflexive and opportunistic mechanisms anchored in ideology then become excessive.

Niklas Luhmann
- Society
- Problems
- To Be